Friday, April 29, 2022

The Clue That 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 Is Not A Genuine Part Of Paul's Original Letter

There are really only one or two verses in the entire New Testament that can seem, without a deeper rationalistic analysis, to genuinely prohibit women from doing something allowed for men.  Both are written--or supposedly written, in the case of one of them--by Paul.  One is 1 Timothy 2:11-12, which is addressed to a specific church and would contradict other parts of the Bible if intended to describe a universal obligation, as Deborah was appointed by God to lead men.  The other is 1 Corinthians 14:34-35, which is a seeming instruction for women to not speak in church and ask questions to their husbands at home.  With the latter verses, there is a major clue within the words themselves that this part of 1 Corinthians 14, as some have suggested, was not even written by Paul.

This clue that these two verses were not part of Paul's original writings is probably overlooked because of the emotionalistic, tradition-based aversion to Mosaic Law.  Almost no Christian is intellectually or personally bold enough to even consider that there is more than the extremely limited Ten Commandments that would still be obligatory today according to the Bible, and there are many myths about how "brutal" Mosaic Law is, so it is more appealing to many Christians to just never read or think about Mosaic Law beyond a few passing thoughts to dismiss it as unimportant.  This kind of thorough but asinine cultural relativism is utterly antithetical to the Biblical moral framework, and anyone who actually read Mosaic Law and reasoned out the concepts it speaks of without making assumptions would be in a better position to evaluate even something like 1 Corinthians 14 that might at first seem unrelated.

When 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 says that women should keep silent as the law says, it is not alluding to anything in the Torah.  What part of Mosaic Law or what other Biblical command from a mouthpiece for God (like a prophet) ever instructs specifically women to be silent?  There is none.  Since Deuteronomy 4:2 condemns adding to God's commands, pretending like the Biblical deity condemns women for speaking or teaching in a church-like context is a violation of the clear command to not add to what Yahweh instructed.  If the Bible is true, since the core of Mosaic Law is what all human laws are supposed to conform to (including its punishments for particular sins that are what response that sin deserves on Earth), a just, righteous society would not silence either men or women on the basis of their gender.  This is not all, however.

There is also (at least in some translations) the "oddity" of 1 Corinthians 14 addressing men and women alike before and after verses 34 and 35, yet the reference to both of them starting in verse 39 is about them prophesying, as is much of the passage before this.  Women cannot prophesy legitimately unless they are divinely permitted to speak!  Before and after this random and erroneous claim that the "law" forbids women from speaking in a place like church, with the only law that has true authority in Christian theology being God's moral revelation in the Torah and that law never saying such a thing, Paul tells both men and women that speaking in tongues is useless if onlookers cannot understand what is being said.  It is actually disruptive of the main points of the chapter to suddenly say something broader about women in church that contradicts what Mosaic Law actually allows for in its egalitarian prescriptions.

Nothing about the context of 1 Corinthians 14 at large nor the specific prescriptions of Mosaic Law suggests that the random comment about women not speaking in church is an authentic part of Paul's original letter now known as 1 Corinthians.  The textual evidence and its ramifications directly suggest that the sudden inclusion of a command for women to be silent in church came after Paul wrote the rest of the chapter.  Otherwise, Paul contradicts himself in this very chapter by addressing men and women about speaking in tongues while saying women need to refrain from speaking in such circumstances--and also cites something from what appears to be Mosaic Law that both is not found in the Torah and contradicts it as well.

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